VLC is one of the most popular media players around. It works on most platforms and can handle almost any type of file. It’s damn near perfect, but you could be getting even more out of VLC by using experimental nightly builds instead of the official version.

A long time ago, Apple made it difficult for third-party developers to make a good media player for the iPhone. Thankfully, over the years they’ve loosened their restrictions, and now you can get a really solid video player with PlayerXtreme.

VLC is already available for Windows 10, but this newly-released “Modern” beta runs on the Universal Windows Platform. That means it’ll get some special features, including Cortana support and live tiles, and it’ll be perfect for the Xbox One, Windows tablets, and even HoloLens, when it’s released.

Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS: VLC is hands-down one of the best media players around and today it gets a little better by adding an in-app extensions store, playback resuming, and more. More importantly, the iOS version of the app returns to the App Store.

Android: VLC has been one of our favorite media players for forever. After a lengthy stint in a beta (plus some region lock annoyances), the app finally graduated to version 1.0. It's now out of beta, though releasing on time is still up for debate.

Watching movies and TV shows on your computer is easy, but if you do a lot of downloading or ripping, you need a video player that's lightweight, can handle virtually anything you throw at it, whether it has subtitles, was encoded a long time ago with some obscure codec, or came in a strange file format. This week…

It's one thing to download movies and TV shows to watch on your desktop or laptop, it's another to have a video player you trust to handle anything you throw at it. The best ones do it flawlessly, without extra downloads or tons of tweaks. This week we want to know which ones you think are the best.

Dear Lifehacker,I feel like every time I browse a music forum online, people are hating on iTunes. Is it just because it's fashionable to hate Apple, or is there actually something wrong with iTunes that I'm missing? It seems to work fine for me.

iOS: VLC, one of the best media players for the desktop, has had a long and tumultuous history, but it's back today after being rebuilt from the ground up to be fast and flexible, play virtually any video file, and so Apple won't give it the boot.

Android: It seems like we've been waiting forever to get XBMC, our favorite media center application, on Android. We haven't seen an official, stable release yet, but a new user-friendly build from the XBMCANDROID team is available now. Here's what you need to know.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Tomahawk is a free desktop music player that combines your local library with the libraries of our favorite streaming music services, like Spotify, Grooveshark, and more, so you don't need to open a multitude of separate players to listen to your music.

Windows: There are plenty of great media players out there for Windows, but if Windows Media Player is your favorite, you already know that by default you can only have one player window open at a time. Multiple Windows Media Player is a freeware utility that tweaks the Windows Media Player executable so you can have…

VLC, our favorite video player for the Mac (and a great player for both Windows and Linux), is releasing a big new version soon, for which you can grab the release candidate right now. It comes with a completely overhauled interface on OS X, with a more iTunes-like library view, not to mention support for Blu-Ray rips…